National Union Party (United States)

The National Union Party, commonly known as the Union Party, and referred to as the Republican-Union coalition by some sources, was a wartime coalition of Republicans, War Democrats, and border state Unconditional Unionists that supported the Lincoln administration during the American Civil War. It held the 1864 National Union Convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln for president and Andrew Johnson for vice president in the 1864 United States presidential election. Following Lincoln's assassination, Johnson tried and failed to sustain the Union Party as a vehicle for his presidential ambitions. The coalition did not contest the 1868 elections, but the Republican Party continued to use the Union Republican label throughout the period of Reconstruction.

Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 United States presidential election, receiving 180 electoral votes and 53% of the popular vote in the free states; opposition to Lincoln was divided, with most Northern Democrats voting for the senior U.S. senator from Illinois Stephen Douglas. Following the Republican victory, unionist War Democrats roundly condemned Confederate secession and publicly supported the national government's efforts to preserve the Union. They sought to cooperate with Republicans in the Lower North through the formation of Union parties opposed by anti-administration Peace Democrats. Elsewhere, the Union Party appeared as a coalition of conservative Republicans and Democrats opposed by the Radical Republicans. Besides allowing voters of diverse pre-war partisan allegiances to act collectively, the Union label served a valuable propaganda purpose by implying the coalition's opponents were dis-unionists.

The preeminent policy of the National Union Party was the preservation of the Union by the prosecution of the war to its ultimate conclusion. They rejected proposals for a negotiated peace as humiliating and ultimately ruinous to the authority of the national government. The party's 1864 platform called for the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment, a "liberal and just" immigration policy, completion of the transcontinental railroad, and condemned the French intervention in Mexico as dangerous to republicanism.